A resident of an Oakland homeless encampment has tested positive for COVID-19, and health officials are rushing to test and isolate the patient’s contacts — hoping to prevent the infection from escalating into an outbreak.

The patient, who was seen at Highland Hospital, identified their place of residence as a tent encampment in Oakland, according to city and county officials.

“Contact tracing is underway and until that is completed, we have no further information to share at this time,” Peter Radu, homeless policy director in Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf’s office, wrote in an email.

Radu would not say in which Oakland encampment the person who tested positive had been living. But two activists who do outreach with the homeless in Oakland told this news organization that the person was living in an RV at an encampment in the High Street area of East Oakland.

Seven people who had contact with the infected individual have been moved to the Comfort Inn near the Oakland airport, according to the two activists. The hotel has been set up as isolation housing for homeless people who have COVID-19, are experiencing symptoms or have been exposed to the virus.

Alameda County health officials mobilized quickly to begin testing and isolating those who came into contact with the sick individual, according to county spokeswoman Jerri Applegate Randrup.

“We sent a team to conduct testing and case investigation at the site within hours of identifying the case,” she wrote in an email. “People at the encampment who had more intensive contact with the index case were offered the opportunity to shelter at Operation Comfort (the Comfort Inn). We understand the City of Oakland is organizing food deliveries and checking in with residents who remain at the tent encampment, encouraging them to self-quarantine and not leave the site.”

The county also is sending a team to offer testing at a safe parking site near the impacted encampment, though interviews conducted with residents so far have not suggested cross-exposure occurred.

So far, there have been no additional positive tests connected with this case, according to Applegate Randrup.

But homeless service providers are worried the virus will spread quickly through the nearby unhoused communities.

“A lot of these folks in homeless settings, they’ll go visit friends and associates in other encampments,” said Derrick Soo, who does outreach work with the homeless in East Oakland. “So the threat of the spread is incredible.”

Candice Elder, founder and executive director of The East Oakland Collective, is watching anxiously to see whether the situation develops into an outbreak. In the meantime, she’s ramped up her distribution of gloves, masks and hand sanitizer to homeless residents in the area.

“We have to see,” she said. “The county’s learning as they go, learning as situations arise.”

As of Monday, Alameda County had reported fewer than 10 cases of COVID-19 among people known to be homeless. Another 18 people who tested positive had no known address and may be homeless.

Activists’ worst fears about a COVID-19 outbreak were realized in San Francisco earlier this month, when the virus swept through the city’s largest homeless shelter — MSC-South — infecting 96 residents and 10 staff members. The city reported a second outbreak at Casa Quezada, a permanent supportive housing facility in the Mission District, where 22 residents and two staff members have tested positive for the virus.

To prevent such outbreaks, officials in Alameda County and throughout the Bay Area have been scrambling to get homeless residents out of crowded shelters and encampments and into hotels where they can self-isolate. But activists complain the effort has been slow and limited, with only select residents qualifying. And in Alameda County, the available hotel rooms are nearly full.

As of Sunday, 82 of the 100 rooms at the Comfort Inn were occupied. At the Radisson Hotel next door, which is reserved for homeless people who do not have COVID-19 but are vulnerable to the virus because they are 65 or older or have underlying health conditions, 271 of the hotel’s 285 rooms were full.

“Given the substantial likelihood of increased numbers of referrals, the County is seeking to expand in the next several weeks to allow additional people to shelter in place safely,” Applegate Randrup wrote in an email.

On Tuesday, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors is set to consider leasing three additional properties to house the homeless during the pandemic.

Marisa Kendall covers homelessness as part of the Bay Area News Group's housing team. She previously covered litigation for The Recorder in San Francisco, and started her career reporting on crime and breaking news for The News-Press in Southwest Florida.

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